Easy A

I was talking to an ex the other day online and in matter of our conversation he managed to somehow turn me into both a virgin and a whore. Strangely enough, I think that is exactly what he wanted.

You should never talk to an ex, and while I know this, it just seems to be more and more so impossible given the unlimited access that our innovative technology has provided us. Anyone else want to go back to the cavemen days when men just walked around grunting and were often away for months on end throughout the hunting season, and probably most of the time weren't even savvy enough to remember how to get back to the cave, or that they even had one in the first place?

So back to my ex, whose sign is a cancer. Strangely enough every cancer that I've dated seems to have wanted me to be both of these extremes all wrapped into on, while they walk around being overly emotional. To be suzy homemaker by day, and a crazy dominatrix by night. Why can't I just be normal?

In our conversation which went from me telling him that if my book isn't published soon, I'm going to have to start working the street corner. Something that I was both joking about, and keeping as an actual last resort. I'm not sure if he got he joke, but he began to go off on a tangent in which he started asking me what my stripper/porn name would be, as well as suggesting that I pole dance first and become a hooker later seeing that that is the natural progression of things as your looks tend to fade. If I had felt at all like he was joking this could've been a rather interesting conversation, what bugs me is that I don't think he was. He than went on to ask me out to a really nice dinner on sat night, once again putting me in the "virgin" category.

While I know men & society in general, under this patriarchal hell that we've been living in for the last 5,000 years, have found it both acceptable and convenient to put women into one of only two possible categories, I wonder why I can't just be me? I'm not either of those, for the most part anyways, and I don't get why I can't be overtly sexual, while also remaining somewhere in between, just like men are allowed to do. More importantly why do men want a "classy" girl on the streets, and a freak in the sheets. Why does he want that? Doesn't he see it as a little bit ridiculous to expect me to dominate him in the bedroom, only so that he can shampoo my hair afterwards when we take a shower together? Wouldn't it be more idyllic to just have a girl who is normal, and not an amalgamation of two things that can't ever be obtained nor exist together in the first place?

I'm not sure what would be more difficult me trying to live up to all these completely contradicting structures, or being misogynistic, supporting a woman embracing her sexuality, and wanting that same woman to be the mother of your supposed 5 children? In a lot of ways it pushes women back into that category of trying to live up to these barbie ideals of being "perfect" which just isn't possible. I think the larger issue, is that putting a woman in a category simply for a man's pleasure, is always the easiest way to quickly degrade her.

I think his complicated attack stems from him being mad at me for not doting over him during the almost 3 years of hell I went through when I was incredibly sick. I came to this realization after I remembered a conversation we had the last time we had seen each other. This was after not seeing each other for a few years because we lived in different states, nor had we been talking during that time b/c I was sick and he never called me. When we did finally see each other and he told me that "he had missed me" to which i responded "thanks", largely because I was really thrown off guard by him telling me that, given that he had shown no actual signs that he had been thinking of me. And I hadn't missed anyone because the only thing that had been on my mind during that whole period was death. I'm sorry if all the "fun" I was having getting biopsies at the cancer center, and being hospitalized for a possible collapsed lung, made me forget that I was suppose to be thinking about you nonstop.

I get that maybe he was hurt that I didn't throw myself at him in a "slutty" maid costume while simultaneously baking him cookies, but I don't think that can ever justify making a woman feel bad about herself, and it certainly doesn't exclude the larger issue of the "virgin/whore" paradigm which needs to be eradicated from our consciousness immediately.